Distinguished Visiting Scholars

Catherine Conybeare, Professor of Classics at Mawr College, is this year's John Bennett Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute and the Centre for Mediaeval Studies. A specialist in late antiquity and the history of early Christian culture, she received her doctorate from the Centre in 1997. She is the author of Paulinus Noster: Self and Symbols in the Letters of Paulinus of Nola (2000) and The Irrational Augustine (2006), as well as, most recently, The Laughter of Sarah (2013). Her essays and articles are informed by historical scholarship and by contemporary theory; they cover a remarkably wide range of subjects, from ideas of memory to the history of emotions and the space of violence, probing in the process diverse works by Tertullian, Prudentius, Augustine, Avitus, among many others. She will deliver the 2014 O'Donnell Lecture, as well as another public lecture this term, both centred or eccentrically focused on Augustine.

Dennis Halft was born in Bonn, Germany and currently lives in Mainz. He joined the Northern German province of Dominican Friars in 2008 and is a member of the Institut dominicain d’études orientales in Cairo. He is a graduate of the Free University in Berlin, having specialized in Islamic, Iranian, and Comparative Religious Studies. His current research focuses on the reception of Arabic Bible translations by Twelver Shiite scholars in Safavid, Persia. He has several publications on medieval and pre-modern Muslim polemical works against Judaism and Christianity.

Rachel Koopmans, the Institute's 2014 York Fellow, received her doctorate from Notre Dame and has taught at York University since 2006, where she is currently Associate Professor of History. Her book, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (2011), was awarded the Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for 2012 by the Canadian Society of Medievalists. That same year, she was also awarded a prestigious Insight Grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for her work on the “miracle windows” depicting Thomas Becket in the Trinity Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral. The resulting study, accepted for the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, to be published by the British Academy and Oxford University Press, promises to be the first major detailed analysis of the subject. Her recent essays include studies of Christina of Markyate and of the testimonial letters associated with the cult of Thomas Becket, among other subjects. She is also preparing a modern English translation of Benedict of Peterborough's Miracles of Thomas Becket.

Mellon Fellows

Shami Ghosh studied at King’s College London, Harvard University, and the University of Toronto, where he received his PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies in 2009. Formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leicester and Junior Research Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, Shami came to PIMS in 2014 as a Mellon Fellow, and has returned in 2015 as Research Fellow with an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for 2015-17. His research interests range from early medieval historiography to global economic history in the eighteenth century.

Claire Jones (Mellon Fellow) is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Notre Dame. She earned her doctorate in 2012 from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation entitled “Communal Song and the Theology of Voice in Medieval German Mysticism.” Her essay “Christian Listening and the Ethical Community of Liturgical Text” was published in Literature and Theology in 2013. While at the Institute, she will complete her book manuscript tentatively entitled The Ecstasy of the Psalms: Mysticism, Song, and Body in Medieval Monasticism.

Annalia Marchisio (Mellon Fellow) was awarded her doctorate in Classics in 2013 at the Università degli Studi di Udine, having submitted a dissertation entitled “La tradizione manoscritta della Relatio di Odorico da Pordenone.” She was a post-doctoral Fellow of the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame from October 2013 to January 2014, and currently holds the Claudio Leonardi Fellowship of the Zeno Karl Schindler Foundation at Harvard University. Her most recent publication, “Il volgarizzamento Tedesco della Relatio di Odorico da Pordenone e il suo modello latino,” appeared in Filologia Mediolatina in 2011. As a Mellon Research Fellow, she will work on a project entitled “Representing the Other in Medieval Travel Literature: The European 'Cartography' of the Far East from 1245 to 1400.”

Stephen Metzger (Mellon Fellow) earned his PhD through the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame in 2013 with a dissertation entitled “Gerard of Abbeville, Secular Master, on Knowledge, Wisdom and Contemplation.” He is the author of two essays on Ioannes Hagen de Indagine published in Bulletin de philosophie medieval in 2008 and 2009, and, with Kent Emery, Jr. and W.J. Courtenay, the co-editor of Philosophy and Theology in the Studia of the Religious Orders and at Papal and Royal Courts, the proceedings of a colloquium held under the auspices of the Société Internationale pour l'Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (Turnhout, 2012). His tenure of the Mellon Research Fellowship will allow him to continue his research on Gerard of Abbeville.

Research Fellows

Richard F. Gyug (AB, Carleton University; MA, PhD, University of Toronto; MSL, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies) is a Research Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and Professor at the Department of History, Fordham University. He is also the author of numerous publications on liturgical books in southern Italy and Dalmatia, and social history in medieval Catalonia.

Linda Safran continues to serve as editor (with Adam S. Cohen) of Gesta, the journal of the International Center of Medieval Art (http://www.medievalart.org/gesta/). With two colleagues, she is writing a textbook on medieval art and architecture to be published by Cornell University Press. Additional projects for this year include the spring symposium in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (on Byzantine, Western Medieval, and Islamic diagrams), which she organized with Jeffrey Hamburger and David Roxburgh of Harvard; continued work on Byzantine Trinitarian and other religious diagrams; and articles on Byzantine art in China and on teaching medieval art in China.

Alain J. Stoclet was educated at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Licence, Agrégation) and at the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies (PhD). He has held a variety of teaching and research positions in Toronto and in Lyon, France, and is currently also associated with the Centre for Medieval Studies as well being a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique's Unité Mixte de Recherche (UMR) 5648 (Lyon).

This site uses cookies to store information on your computer. Cookies are required for some features of our website and help us improve it by giving us an idea of ​​how the site is used. Learn more cookies in our 'Cookies policy' section. cookies policy